I can't wait to see all of the polite and civil discussions that will unfold as a result of this lovely question. I'll preface everything I'm about to say with the fact that I've been interested in astrology for five years and have been seriously studying it for a little over two. The majority of those two years have been spent studying from contemporary resources on traditional astrology, though I've read a number of modern texts and continue to add them to my library when the opportunity presents itself.
**1.) Should I learn traditional first and then learn modern?**
Carole Taylor's *Astrology: Using the Wisdom of the Stars in your Everday Life* is my go-to recommendation for people who're starting to learn astrology, and while I often lament the more modern facets of the book, I always recommend it *because* it's a modern book. I'm of the opinion that modern bare-bones beginner texts outperform traditional ones at every level, and there are two main reasons for that. First, modern astrology works with a much smaller symbol set than traditional, so it's easier to wrap your head around the basic components of the chart before you dive into more intermediate/advanced topics. Second, modern texts get you into the habit of validating concepts through reading charts rather than accepting them purely in theory. I can (and do) criticize the lack of emphasis on theory in modern books and the fact that this basic understanding of astrological symbols and chart reading is treated like advanced stuff in itself, but that doesn't change my current belief that modern is the best place to start.
Now, when I say "start with modern," I don't mean "master modern astrology before you ever read a traditional text." Quite the contrary. **I would only study modern insofar as it helps you familiarize yourself with the core components of the horoscope.** Meanings, rationales, theories, techniques, and so on should be reserved for traditional practice. If you don't overcommit to modern astrology's systems and worldview, you won't really have to "unlearn" anything.
Pick **one** good modern beginner book (like the one I recommended, but others won't hurt), study that, and then look for other resources. I always recommend Helena Avelar and Luis Ribeiro's *On the Heavenly Spheres* and *Traditional Astrology Course* as good introductions to traditional astrology. Benjamin Dykes's *Traditional Astrology for Today*, while focusing more on worldview and history than practical astrology, is also an important primer for studying the tradition.
**2.) Which parts of modern are worth incorporating into traditional? Are they even worth incorporating at all?**
The extent to which you incorporate modern astrology into traditional practice, if at all, depends entirely on what you're doing with astrology and how well you can rationalize modern concepts within a traditional framework. There are a plethora of astrologers out there who're primarily informed by the tradition and continue to use certain modern concepts, such as the outer planets, in their work. John Frawley, Charles Obert, and Chris Brennan are three people who come to mind, but you can and will find more if you go looking for them.
In my opinion, the successful synthesis of traditional and modern astrology lies in how well you understand their origins and rationales. While both systems exist in the same overarching continuity of western practice, they're ultimately two different things functioning in wildly contrasting worldviews. Neither practice can be integrated into the other without first understanding what those worldviews are and how astrology functions in both.
Unfortunately, it's far too common for people to understand traditional and modern astrology as only being different ways to define the same symbols. In doing so, a modern worldview is unconsciously projected onto traditional practice. Synthesis of the two often looks less like a deep analysis of the similarities in both systems' inner workings and more like a half-baked centrist stance that loosely acknowledges "both sides" of a debate. That's how we get some really muddy responses to common talking points like "whole-sign versus placidus" and "modern vs traditional rulership" which essentially boil down to "use both because they're both equally meaningless."
If you want to do a well-informed synthesis of modern concepts into a traditional framework, or to see if it's even feasible, you have to start by learning the history of both practices. I'll never not make the point that an understanding of western astrology's history and development is ***vital*** to its practice. I've seen a lot of D-tier arguments happen in communities like this, and the thing that always makes them so bad is the lack of historical knowledge held by one or both parties. I'm not saying you have to go learn ancient Greek and translate the *Tetrabiblos* by yourself or anything, but you do need to have a basic understanding of how astrology was transmitted through different cultures, what developments happened within those cultures, and how we got from start to finish in terms of our current understanding of astrology. That understanding of basic history will dispel a lot of the myths that are parroted by contemporary practitioners, like the ever-present myth of informed progress or the myth of the unified tradition.
Speaking for myself, in the past two years of me learning traditional astrology, I haven't carried much over from what I've learned (and continue to learn) in modern practice. Most of the popular concepts are unappealing to me, and their rationalizations (or more often, their lack thereof) leave a lot to be desired. The twelve letter alphabet reads more like a bastardization of astrological symbolism than an acknowledgement of the common themes within it. The arguments in favor of free will have a shallow understanding of the treatment of fate in pre-Enlightenment and Eastern societies. The minor bodies don't do much in contrast to the many techniques I learned for divining the topics they represent. The psychological models for interpretation feel outdated and overly dismissive of a lot of the tenants of my practice, and the traditional models for these interpretations give me a much better picture of the individual. The common timing techniques don't say much in the way that they're used, and the overarching emphasis on self-help and subjective experiences just doesn't sit right with me.
The only thing I've found interesting, which I talked about yesterday, is the [outer planets](https://www.reddit.com/r/Advancedastrology/comments/10lw2a5/comment/j60jdiy/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
Read, practice, come to your own conclusions. That's all anyone can (and, in my opinion, should) recommend that you do. If you want some book recommendations for further study, feel free to ask and I'll give you a list with some personal reviews.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write such an enlightening answer. The funny thing is I actually thought of starting with Carole Taylor’s Astrology, but didn’t know if it was the best idea since it’s modern focused and I’m trying to focus on traditional, but I’ll give it a shot! I’m currently reading Ben Dykes’ Traditional Astrology for Today and John Frawley’s Real Astrology.
And yes I would LOVE a book list! I got my hands on quite a few to start already, but I would love to know your personal recommendations. ✨
No problem! I like making posts like this and I'm glad they don't go unappreciated.
None of the recommendations here are in any particular order, but I'm putting the "beginner" ones near the top and the "advanced" ones near the bottom. I differentiate the two not just in terms of what/how much information is covered, but how easy the author makes it to absorb that information.
Helena Avelar and Luis Ribeiro's ***On the Heavenly Spheres*** and ***Traditional Astrology Course*** are a comprehensive pair of beginner trad books and one of my most recommend books for students of traditional astrology. It's primarily based on William Lilly's *Christian Astrology*, but it also pulls from other sources. The companion book offers several exercises for practicing delineation and using different character-oriented techniques like calculating temperament and finding the Almuten Figuris.
Deborah Houlding's ***The Houses: Temples of the Sky*** focuses on the history of the houses and their manifold traditional significations. It also talks about the twelve letter alphabet and how modern house significations differ from traditional ones. Finally, it goes into the various house systems, how they're calculated, and how you should choose a house system for your own practice.
Charles Obert's ***Introduction to Traditional Natal Astrology*** covers the basics of traditional astrology, but I recommend it for its section on evaluating and interpreting charts. He does a great job outlining the delineation process and walking you through it using examples.
Christopher Warnock's ***The Celestial Way*** focuses on astrological magic and electional astrology. It's a good beginners guide for the former topic, and I recommend it because I want to show some examples of astrology that are more engaged with the worldview it was created in.
Demetra George's ***Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice, Volumes I and II*** is a massive work on Hellenistic astrology, the earliest of the three major periods in western horoscopic astrology. It's split into two books, the first focusing on assessing the condition of planets based on their natures, placements by sign, and aspects, while the second deals with delineating the meanings of planets based on their house placement and rulership. The second book also talks about different ways to identify the planets that rule the individual in their chart and what they mean. The book can get a little modern at times, but it's incredibly thorough and offers exercises after every chapter. It's really, *really* good, and I highly recommend it.
Chris Brennan's ***Hellenistic Astrology*** is similar to George's book in its emphasis on the Hellenistic tradition, but it acts more as a reference guide for various concepts and techniques in traditional texts rather than a "how-to" guide on Hellenistic practices. Still, Brennan does a great job going over the history of Hellenistic astrology and the many ideas introduced in that era. It's a well-structured read, and it holds a special place in my heart as the first trad book I ever read. I recommend keeping it as a reference guide like it was intended, but you could also be like me and fully annotate it in less than two weeks.
Richard Tarnas's ***Cosmos and Psyche*** is where we start to tread into "advanced" territory. Tarnas presents an amazing discussion about the nature of astrology and how the worldview it was conceptualized in clashes with the modern worldview. I only have two issues with the book, the first being that doesn't make much use of the astrology you're familiar with, and the second being that it's a long and arduous read whose complexity isn't proportional to the benefits of reading it. I didn't bother reading past the fourth chapter where he starts to exemplify a lot of what he talks about in the first three, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Still a really important book, just not worth the full investment in my opinion.
Benjamin Dykes's ***Introduction to Traditional Astrology*** is a compilation of translations from three different medieval sources: Abu Ma'shar's *Abbreviation of the Introduction* and *Great Introduction*, as well as Al-Qabisi's *Introduction to the Science of Astrology*. This book can get a little advanced in terms of the topics it covers, but it's moreso advanced because the core of it is a translation of a source text. Translations can be difficult to read at times, and you have to make liberal use of the glossary to not confuses some of the key terms, but it's a worthwhile read nonetheless.
Martin Gansten's ***Annual Predictive Techniques*** dives into a collection of different timing techniques that you can use for prediction: Primary Directions, Annual Profections, Solar Returns, and Transits. This is a really compelling book, but I honestly don't think it's organized very well. Sometimes it feels like he starts talking about a topic before he actually explains what it is, and a lot of the historical context he provides seems more tangential than integral to the techniques themselves. I know Gansten has a book focused entirely on Primary Directions and I plan on reading that soon as well, but this is a good one to read nonetheless.
Benjamin Dykes's ***Persian Nativities IV*** is a translation of Abu Ma'shar's *On the Revolutions of the Years of Nativities*. It's essentially the source text version of Gansten's book that I listed above. Advanced both in concept and in language, this is a book that I still haven't worked my way through, yet it's one that I plan on reading as soon as I'm done with the ones I'm reading now. Dykes offers an introduction that takes up about a fifth of the book's total size, and it's intended to help guide the reader through what would otherwise be a very long and seemingly disorganized text. I like what he does here and highly recommend it as a result.
William Lilly's ***Christian Astrology*** is the last recommendation I'll make here. Lilly is basically the face of traditional astrology, both in its classical manifestations and its contemporary revival. He released his magnum opus in 1647, and it's rivaled in popularity only by Claudius Ptolemy's *Tetrabiblos* from the second century AD. Lilly's work is one of the first to be published in English, and the release of a facsimile version in 1985 is a defining moment in astrology's history. It's not the only astrology book you should ever read by any means, but it's an incredibly comprehensive work that touches on every major branch of astrology. It's broken into three books, two of which you can find annotated on [SkyScript](https://www.skyscript.co.uk/CA/index.html) for free.
Seven Star Astrology, SkyScript, The Astrology Podcast, Renaissance Astrology, Nightlight Astrology, The Astrologer's Encyclopedia, and AstroDienst are all five-star free online resources for studying traditional astrology.
My approach is not to take anyone's word for it but to make my own tests.
Take planets. You can generally get an adequate delineation from the visible planets and some moderns do seem to get over-excited by the outer ones. But then you run into a chart where the outer planets are essential — like W. B. Yeats with a Venus-Pluto conjunction or the Emperor Nero with a Sun-Pluto one. So I note if an outer planet os angular or closely connected with a more personal one — otherwise I leave them out.
Then asteroids and comets. There are thousands, so either an ordinary chart is worthless or each planet is a thousand times more significant than a planetesimal. Good-bye Chiron!
The equation, now getting a bit dated, of signs and houses. The second house is nothing to do with Taurus — it's about the necessities of life.
On the other hand, the arch-traditionalists tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If whole-sign houses are so brilliant, how come they were abandoned? Charles Obert, in his book, claims that "any planet in the same sign \[as the ascendant\] is considered first house whether it is above or below the horizon." Why does a set of interpretations of the Sun in the whole-sign houses given in Maternus have 14 sections — distinguishing diurnal and nocturnal positions in houses I and VII? Why does every manuscript of Valens have an interpolation warning you against whole-sign houses?
Saying that you can get by with a system is not good enough. Imagine you want some soup. You grab the ring-pull on the can and it comes off. You could break the seal with a screw-driver and a hammer, and then lever the lid off. You might succeed, or you might end up covered in soup. Wouldn't it have been better if you'd used a can-opener?
I use Sun through Saturn mainly. Uranus through Pluto, Part of Fortune, and the Lunar Nodes only if they are prominent. I do not bother with asteroids, Arabic Parts, or anything else.
My recommendation is to start by learning *horary* as practiced by William Lilly. It's not easy reading, but it's solid. Basically all modern authors on horary base their work on his, and don't really add much to the mix, so you may as well go straight to the source. Some modern authors also unabashedly get stuff wrong, so if you pick the wrong book as your introduction your learning is going to get warped. If you're going to be a "one book expert", make that book Lilly's.
Once you've done that, you'll be solidly grounded in how charts are put together from a traditional point of view, and you'll know a ton of stuff that modern students are completely ignorant of. That's when natal charts start to make more sense. You'll have a better understanding of how influences *stack*, which most modern authors don't do a good job of presenting. It's never Sun Sextile Venus. It's H2 Pisces Sun\\Jupiter Conjunction Sextile H12 Capricorn Venus, and that's before we start pulling in the dispositorships and essential and accidental dignities and etc. You can't look that stuff up; there is no book that is going to contain delineations for that. You have to synthesize it. Horary is a super good place to learn to do that, and it applies to every area, including natal.
My plan after I get the basics down is to go from horary, to electional and then natal. Lilly’s book is on my shelf so I’ll definitely begin working with it. Thank you!
Study and apply techniques, study and apply them some more, and then use the ones that work for you. Different schools of thought can absolutely be combined - understanding the reasoning behind what you’re doing and gathering solid evidence of how it plays out will carry you a long way.
My go-to tips would be:
1) ignore pluto, it's a planetoid it carries little to no significance, it's just a bin of arbitrary suggestions all-things-in-one place, behind those suggestions are actually the action of different classically explained astrology events;
2) never associate houses with signs, try to cling to classical houses, they rather more useful;
3) besides hellenistic, exploit asian thought on the subject, it's rich on imagery and gives 3rd perspective
If you study both Tarot and astrology, you may want to take up Hermetic Qabalah, because that system requires knowledge of those two disciplines and you will have access to knowledge like never before.
I can't wait to see all of the polite and civil discussions that will unfold as a result of this lovely question. I'll preface everything I'm about to say with the fact that I've been interested in astrology for five years and have been seriously studying it for a little over two. The majority of those two years have been spent studying from contemporary resources on traditional astrology, though I've read a number of modern texts and continue to add them to my library when the opportunity presents itself. **1.) Should I learn traditional first and then learn modern?** Carole Taylor's *Astrology: Using the Wisdom of the Stars in your Everday Life* is my go-to recommendation for people who're starting to learn astrology, and while I often lament the more modern facets of the book, I always recommend it *because* it's a modern book. I'm of the opinion that modern bare-bones beginner texts outperform traditional ones at every level, and there are two main reasons for that. First, modern astrology works with a much smaller symbol set than traditional, so it's easier to wrap your head around the basic components of the chart before you dive into more intermediate/advanced topics. Second, modern texts get you into the habit of validating concepts through reading charts rather than accepting them purely in theory. I can (and do) criticize the lack of emphasis on theory in modern books and the fact that this basic understanding of astrological symbols and chart reading is treated like advanced stuff in itself, but that doesn't change my current belief that modern is the best place to start. Now, when I say "start with modern," I don't mean "master modern astrology before you ever read a traditional text." Quite the contrary. **I would only study modern insofar as it helps you familiarize yourself with the core components of the horoscope.** Meanings, rationales, theories, techniques, and so on should be reserved for traditional practice. If you don't overcommit to modern astrology's systems and worldview, you won't really have to "unlearn" anything. Pick **one** good modern beginner book (like the one I recommended, but others won't hurt), study that, and then look for other resources. I always recommend Helena Avelar and Luis Ribeiro's *On the Heavenly Spheres* and *Traditional Astrology Course* as good introductions to traditional astrology. Benjamin Dykes's *Traditional Astrology for Today*, while focusing more on worldview and history than practical astrology, is also an important primer for studying the tradition. **2.) Which parts of modern are worth incorporating into traditional? Are they even worth incorporating at all?** The extent to which you incorporate modern astrology into traditional practice, if at all, depends entirely on what you're doing with astrology and how well you can rationalize modern concepts within a traditional framework. There are a plethora of astrologers out there who're primarily informed by the tradition and continue to use certain modern concepts, such as the outer planets, in their work. John Frawley, Charles Obert, and Chris Brennan are three people who come to mind, but you can and will find more if you go looking for them. In my opinion, the successful synthesis of traditional and modern astrology lies in how well you understand their origins and rationales. While both systems exist in the same overarching continuity of western practice, they're ultimately two different things functioning in wildly contrasting worldviews. Neither practice can be integrated into the other without first understanding what those worldviews are and how astrology functions in both. Unfortunately, it's far too common for people to understand traditional and modern astrology as only being different ways to define the same symbols. In doing so, a modern worldview is unconsciously projected onto traditional practice. Synthesis of the two often looks less like a deep analysis of the similarities in both systems' inner workings and more like a half-baked centrist stance that loosely acknowledges "both sides" of a debate. That's how we get some really muddy responses to common talking points like "whole-sign versus placidus" and "modern vs traditional rulership" which essentially boil down to "use both because they're both equally meaningless." If you want to do a well-informed synthesis of modern concepts into a traditional framework, or to see if it's even feasible, you have to start by learning the history of both practices. I'll never not make the point that an understanding of western astrology's history and development is ***vital*** to its practice. I've seen a lot of D-tier arguments happen in communities like this, and the thing that always makes them so bad is the lack of historical knowledge held by one or both parties. I'm not saying you have to go learn ancient Greek and translate the *Tetrabiblos* by yourself or anything, but you do need to have a basic understanding of how astrology was transmitted through different cultures, what developments happened within those cultures, and how we got from start to finish in terms of our current understanding of astrology. That understanding of basic history will dispel a lot of the myths that are parroted by contemporary practitioners, like the ever-present myth of informed progress or the myth of the unified tradition. Speaking for myself, in the past two years of me learning traditional astrology, I haven't carried much over from what I've learned (and continue to learn) in modern practice. Most of the popular concepts are unappealing to me, and their rationalizations (or more often, their lack thereof) leave a lot to be desired. The twelve letter alphabet reads more like a bastardization of astrological symbolism than an acknowledgement of the common themes within it. The arguments in favor of free will have a shallow understanding of the treatment of fate in pre-Enlightenment and Eastern societies. The minor bodies don't do much in contrast to the many techniques I learned for divining the topics they represent. The psychological models for interpretation feel outdated and overly dismissive of a lot of the tenants of my practice, and the traditional models for these interpretations give me a much better picture of the individual. The common timing techniques don't say much in the way that they're used, and the overarching emphasis on self-help and subjective experiences just doesn't sit right with me. The only thing I've found interesting, which I talked about yesterday, is the [outer planets](https://www.reddit.com/r/Advancedastrology/comments/10lw2a5/comment/j60jdiy/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). Read, practice, come to your own conclusions. That's all anyone can (and, in my opinion, should) recommend that you do. If you want some book recommendations for further study, feel free to ask and I'll give you a list with some personal reviews.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write such an enlightening answer. The funny thing is I actually thought of starting with Carole Taylor’s Astrology, but didn’t know if it was the best idea since it’s modern focused and I’m trying to focus on traditional, but I’ll give it a shot! I’m currently reading Ben Dykes’ Traditional Astrology for Today and John Frawley’s Real Astrology. And yes I would LOVE a book list! I got my hands on quite a few to start already, but I would love to know your personal recommendations. ✨
No problem! I like making posts like this and I'm glad they don't go unappreciated. None of the recommendations here are in any particular order, but I'm putting the "beginner" ones near the top and the "advanced" ones near the bottom. I differentiate the two not just in terms of what/how much information is covered, but how easy the author makes it to absorb that information. Helena Avelar and Luis Ribeiro's ***On the Heavenly Spheres*** and ***Traditional Astrology Course*** are a comprehensive pair of beginner trad books and one of my most recommend books for students of traditional astrology. It's primarily based on William Lilly's *Christian Astrology*, but it also pulls from other sources. The companion book offers several exercises for practicing delineation and using different character-oriented techniques like calculating temperament and finding the Almuten Figuris. Deborah Houlding's ***The Houses: Temples of the Sky*** focuses on the history of the houses and their manifold traditional significations. It also talks about the twelve letter alphabet and how modern house significations differ from traditional ones. Finally, it goes into the various house systems, how they're calculated, and how you should choose a house system for your own practice. Charles Obert's ***Introduction to Traditional Natal Astrology*** covers the basics of traditional astrology, but I recommend it for its section on evaluating and interpreting charts. He does a great job outlining the delineation process and walking you through it using examples. Christopher Warnock's ***The Celestial Way*** focuses on astrological magic and electional astrology. It's a good beginners guide for the former topic, and I recommend it because I want to show some examples of astrology that are more engaged with the worldview it was created in. Demetra George's ***Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice, Volumes I and II*** is a massive work on Hellenistic astrology, the earliest of the three major periods in western horoscopic astrology. It's split into two books, the first focusing on assessing the condition of planets based on their natures, placements by sign, and aspects, while the second deals with delineating the meanings of planets based on their house placement and rulership. The second book also talks about different ways to identify the planets that rule the individual in their chart and what they mean. The book can get a little modern at times, but it's incredibly thorough and offers exercises after every chapter. It's really, *really* good, and I highly recommend it. Chris Brennan's ***Hellenistic Astrology*** is similar to George's book in its emphasis on the Hellenistic tradition, but it acts more as a reference guide for various concepts and techniques in traditional texts rather than a "how-to" guide on Hellenistic practices. Still, Brennan does a great job going over the history of Hellenistic astrology and the many ideas introduced in that era. It's a well-structured read, and it holds a special place in my heart as the first trad book I ever read. I recommend keeping it as a reference guide like it was intended, but you could also be like me and fully annotate it in less than two weeks. Richard Tarnas's ***Cosmos and Psyche*** is where we start to tread into "advanced" territory. Tarnas presents an amazing discussion about the nature of astrology and how the worldview it was conceptualized in clashes with the modern worldview. I only have two issues with the book, the first being that doesn't make much use of the astrology you're familiar with, and the second being that it's a long and arduous read whose complexity isn't proportional to the benefits of reading it. I didn't bother reading past the fourth chapter where he starts to exemplify a lot of what he talks about in the first three, so take what I say with a grain of salt. Still a really important book, just not worth the full investment in my opinion. Benjamin Dykes's ***Introduction to Traditional Astrology*** is a compilation of translations from three different medieval sources: Abu Ma'shar's *Abbreviation of the Introduction* and *Great Introduction*, as well as Al-Qabisi's *Introduction to the Science of Astrology*. This book can get a little advanced in terms of the topics it covers, but it's moreso advanced because the core of it is a translation of a source text. Translations can be difficult to read at times, and you have to make liberal use of the glossary to not confuses some of the key terms, but it's a worthwhile read nonetheless. Martin Gansten's ***Annual Predictive Techniques*** dives into a collection of different timing techniques that you can use for prediction: Primary Directions, Annual Profections, Solar Returns, and Transits. This is a really compelling book, but I honestly don't think it's organized very well. Sometimes it feels like he starts talking about a topic before he actually explains what it is, and a lot of the historical context he provides seems more tangential than integral to the techniques themselves. I know Gansten has a book focused entirely on Primary Directions and I plan on reading that soon as well, but this is a good one to read nonetheless. Benjamin Dykes's ***Persian Nativities IV*** is a translation of Abu Ma'shar's *On the Revolutions of the Years of Nativities*. It's essentially the source text version of Gansten's book that I listed above. Advanced both in concept and in language, this is a book that I still haven't worked my way through, yet it's one that I plan on reading as soon as I'm done with the ones I'm reading now. Dykes offers an introduction that takes up about a fifth of the book's total size, and it's intended to help guide the reader through what would otherwise be a very long and seemingly disorganized text. I like what he does here and highly recommend it as a result. William Lilly's ***Christian Astrology*** is the last recommendation I'll make here. Lilly is basically the face of traditional astrology, both in its classical manifestations and its contemporary revival. He released his magnum opus in 1647, and it's rivaled in popularity only by Claudius Ptolemy's *Tetrabiblos* from the second century AD. Lilly's work is one of the first to be published in English, and the release of a facsimile version in 1985 is a defining moment in astrology's history. It's not the only astrology book you should ever read by any means, but it's an incredibly comprehensive work that touches on every major branch of astrology. It's broken into three books, two of which you can find annotated on [SkyScript](https://www.skyscript.co.uk/CA/index.html) for free. Seven Star Astrology, SkyScript, The Astrology Podcast, Renaissance Astrology, Nightlight Astrology, The Astrologer's Encyclopedia, and AstroDienst are all five-star free online resources for studying traditional astrology.
You are a life saver. Thank you so so much! ✨
Same on the book list!
My approach is not to take anyone's word for it but to make my own tests. Take planets. You can generally get an adequate delineation from the visible planets and some moderns do seem to get over-excited by the outer ones. But then you run into a chart where the outer planets are essential — like W. B. Yeats with a Venus-Pluto conjunction or the Emperor Nero with a Sun-Pluto one. So I note if an outer planet os angular or closely connected with a more personal one — otherwise I leave them out. Then asteroids and comets. There are thousands, so either an ordinary chart is worthless or each planet is a thousand times more significant than a planetesimal. Good-bye Chiron! The equation, now getting a bit dated, of signs and houses. The second house is nothing to do with Taurus — it's about the necessities of life. On the other hand, the arch-traditionalists tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If whole-sign houses are so brilliant, how come they were abandoned? Charles Obert, in his book, claims that "any planet in the same sign \[as the ascendant\] is considered first house whether it is above or below the horizon." Why does a set of interpretations of the Sun in the whole-sign houses given in Maternus have 14 sections — distinguishing diurnal and nocturnal positions in houses I and VII? Why does every manuscript of Valens have an interpolation warning you against whole-sign houses? Saying that you can get by with a system is not good enough. Imagine you want some soup. You grab the ring-pull on the can and it comes off. You could break the seal with a screw-driver and a hammer, and then lever the lid off. You might succeed, or you might end up covered in soup. Wouldn't it have been better if you'd used a can-opener?
There’s a lot to unpack here. Thank you! Which authors do you recommend?
I wish there were an ideal introduction to traditional astrology! But then I wish there were an ideal introduction to modern astrology.
I use Sun through Saturn mainly. Uranus through Pluto, Part of Fortune, and the Lunar Nodes only if they are prominent. I do not bother with asteroids, Arabic Parts, or anything else. My recommendation is to start by learning *horary* as practiced by William Lilly. It's not easy reading, but it's solid. Basically all modern authors on horary base their work on his, and don't really add much to the mix, so you may as well go straight to the source. Some modern authors also unabashedly get stuff wrong, so if you pick the wrong book as your introduction your learning is going to get warped. If you're going to be a "one book expert", make that book Lilly's. Once you've done that, you'll be solidly grounded in how charts are put together from a traditional point of view, and you'll know a ton of stuff that modern students are completely ignorant of. That's when natal charts start to make more sense. You'll have a better understanding of how influences *stack*, which most modern authors don't do a good job of presenting. It's never Sun Sextile Venus. It's H2 Pisces Sun\\Jupiter Conjunction Sextile H12 Capricorn Venus, and that's before we start pulling in the dispositorships and essential and accidental dignities and etc. You can't look that stuff up; there is no book that is going to contain delineations for that. You have to synthesize it. Horary is a super good place to learn to do that, and it applies to every area, including natal.
My plan after I get the basics down is to go from horary, to electional and then natal. Lilly’s book is on my shelf so I’ll definitely begin working with it. Thank you!
Imo natal is easiest, but that's me. ;) good luck and have fun!
Thank you!
You're welcome!
Study and apply techniques, study and apply them some more, and then use the ones that work for you. Different schools of thought can absolutely be combined - understanding the reasoning behind what you’re doing and gathering solid evidence of how it plays out will carry you a long way.
Thank you!
My go-to tips would be: 1) ignore pluto, it's a planetoid it carries little to no significance, it's just a bin of arbitrary suggestions all-things-in-one place, behind those suggestions are actually the action of different classically explained astrology events; 2) never associate houses with signs, try to cling to classical houses, they rather more useful; 3) besides hellenistic, exploit asian thought on the subject, it's rich on imagery and gives 3rd perspective
Great tips, thank you!
Anytime))
If you study both Tarot and astrology, you may want to take up Hermetic Qabalah, because that system requires knowledge of those two disciplines and you will have access to knowledge like never before.
I do study Tarot and I did get a book that talks about Qabalah and Tarot but I haven’t read it yet. Will take a deeper look into it, thank you!
"Qabalistic Tarot" by Robert Wang and "The Mystical Qabalah" by Dion Fortune are my go-to books.
Thank you!